Andrew M Brown is the Telegraph's obituaries editor.

Why 'Mr Stink' beats 'King Solomon's Mines' for children today

Roald Dahl and a mock-up of the Giant Peach in 1986 (Photo: Rex Features)

From The Sunday Telegraph

'No friend is as loyal as a book,” said Ernest Hemingway. That gets to the key point about books, which is that they are basically friends. They make life better. Especially if you get into them young: only last week a study revealed that children who were read to early in life did better at school. The trouble is, what to read to them?

Everyone wants their children to grow up loving the classics they remember fondly. But it’s not that easy. When I read to my children, I aim a bit too high.

I pick stories based on a mixture of my own nostalgic memories and a desire to educate them. Plus, I choose something I think will be fun to read. So I end up imposing my fogeyish tastes on my offspring, forgetting that the older ones are still only seven and eight.

Take The Wind in the Willows. I imagined the children would be sitting up in bed, enthralled by Kenneth Grahame’s romantic vision; within a few pages they were attacking each other under the duvet. So I gave up. They can come back to Ratty and Mole and the Piper at the Gates of Dawn when they’re ready. Treasure Island is faring better. But they’re not convinced by my wobbly West Country accent, and the older one claims not to like pirates.

Not that they reject old books altogether. They really liked The Little Grey Men, a bucolic fantasy written during the war by “BB”, about the last gnomes in Britain on a dangerous quest to find a lost comrade. Our daughter is devouring the Little House on the Prairie series, written in the 1930s by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Her brother, meanwhile, rattled through David Walliams’s recent novels (Gangsta Granny, Mr Stink etc) – twice, actually, which means he has already cottoned on to the delicious pleasure of revisiting favourite works. He loves the Roald Dahl-style comic grotesques in Walliams, such as Raj the stingy newsagent who sells half-eaten chocolate bars for 10p off.

Is it really surprising if Mr Stink wins out over King Solomon’s Mines? The literary landscape has changed. Never before have there been so many books tailored specially to the tastes of children in every age category.

It’s Dahl’s fault. Kingsley Amis tells an unkind story in his Memoirs about the author of James and the Giant Peach. The two writers met at a party at Tom Stoppard’s country house in the Seventies. By this time they were both middle-aged, cantankerous and booze-raddled. Dahl arrived in a helicopter, and goaded Amis: “What you want to do is write a children’s book. That’s where the money is today, believe me.” Amis said he hadn’t enjoyed children’s books as a child and had no feel for them. “Never mind,” snapped Dahl, “the little bastards’d swallow it.”

Actually, as he surely knew, that is the opposite of the truth. Children will read what they want to read. And some books are best discovered on your own.

…

Costa Coffee is apparently opening three new outlets a week. But will our appetite for premium coffee ever be sated? And where will it end? With us all drowning in an ocean of warm, coffee-and-hazelnut-flavoured froth, probably.

A latte every day on the way to work tots up to nearly £1,000 a year. It’s a sort of daily tax, but one we gladly pay. We like the service, some companiable chat, the sense of pampering, the cardboard cups – the fact that someone asks, “Any pastries or muffins with that?” And we’re addicted to sweet milky drinks: let’s face it, most of us aren’t sipping those bitter, dark espressos they drink on the Continent.

You could try to recoup your spending by buying shares in Costa’s parent company, Whitbread: if you’d done that during the slump of 2009 you’d have doubled your money by now. But there is an alternative: why not bring back that old lunchtime standby, the Thermos flask? Humble but reliable, the vacuum flask was something people took to work with their corned beef sandwiches.

It would be nice if you could turn up at the office with a Thermos and people didn’t assume you were going mountain climbing.